Advice Column

 

“What advice would you give your great grandchildren?”

Dear me. Will answering this question make me a preacher? Or a prognosticator? A sage? A voice crying in the wilderness? Or will it brand me indelibly as a grumpy cross old lady wrapped up in my 'back in the day' cobwebs and shaking my finger at the back of everyone who avoids me as a bore?

Fortunately, my sample size of great grandmas doesn't include any incredible bores. There's hope for me yet.

First thing to remember, great grandchildren-to-be, is how fortunate we will be to get to know each other....how marvelous and amazing it will be for me to have held in my arms, whispered nonsense to, held hands with and tickled toes of not just your mommies or daddies, but your grandmas or grandpas....and now YOU! I didn't know my great grandparents: I couldn't even tell you the names of all of them, though I do have photos of some of them on the walls of my guest room. These great grandparents only figure in a few tales left behind by my Granny, who had the urge to write them down so her grandkids would hear them, and your great grandpa Blake's grandpa who told dozens of stories to his grandsons...then they remembered the funniest ones and told their kids, too.

So...maybe that's my very first bit of advice, even if it's not the most important or most useful: Tell your children stories...even when they don't ask to hear them. Take the pictures, go to the cemeteries, pass on the traditions. Build your family brick by brick and connect your past to your present. You have roots, kids, and they reach deep in the country you have come from, or your folks came from. I learned to love your great grandfather because he told stories of his town, his parents, his farm, his history...funny stories full of character and idiosyncrasy. I learned to know your Great Grandpa's family from afar...before I came to Atchison county to join them and grow roots here myself. You come from a long line of storytellers...

Travel. Travel cheap when you're young and pack sandwiches and cereal and milk and your one hot meal a day is cheap Chinese or cheap Mexican. Stop for historical markers and local museums and national parks and pose one or more family members in every picture. Climb trails and skip stones on lakes and toss pebbles into creeks and pick up rocks as souvenirs.

Then, later, see the great cities, go to the theater, eat good food, stay in a room with a view. Spend whatever is necessary to qualify as a splurge....every once in a while. What was magical to me...your great grandma...may be antiquated to you....but, believe me, high class never goes out of style.

Sigh. All this fun will come at a cost. And that cost, lovely kids, is work. Your grandparents will tell you how very hard they worked in rain forest heat and bone chilling winds building greenhouses and loading trucks...how they awoke and fed their animals in their pajamas and muck boots long before the sun rose. And your parents will tell you they spent summer day after summer day getting up early to fill thousands of pots with mix while their friends were sleeping in until nine.

And I'm here to tell that it's TRUE, all TRUE! Yes, your grandparents worked hard with us building our business and learning the burden of responsibility: for years after the fact, they would awake from dreams in which the steers were out of feed or the well had pumped dry because a hydrant was left on. Your parents are learning all about sweat equity down in that dirt shed; today they're paid only with an afternoon free to swim or read in the cool shade, but before you know it, they will be logging hours on a time card and saving for a college car. Great-grands, whatever your career and your livelihood, you will have learned the dignity of working with your hands, the reward of working side by side with your family, and earned the right to tell those 'way back when' stories to future generations.

Finally, exercise your minds as well as your hearts and hands. Read. Read fantasy and history, mystery and adventure. Escape, enrich, enjoy. Read your Bibles for instruction, for counsel, for comfort, for encouragement. Read the stories you loved to your children....The Poky Little Puppy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mike Mulligan's Steam Shovel, Hobo Dog, Winnie the Pooh. They are the common threads of your cultural heritage. My parents left a roomful of books three foot tall by 12 foot long by 6 foot wide, proof of a lifelong curiosity on a variety of subjects. Among these books are my grandfather's engineering text, my grandmother's poetry books, my father's Spanish dictionary and German Bible and my mother's botany book. I doubt that anyone else will ever read these volumes, but I will preserve them in hopes that you and your children will leaf through them, read the frontispieces and the notes in the margin, and comprehend the glorious debt of enrichment you owe your book loving ancestors.

Oh, great-grands...there is so much more! Play music...sing loud in church....plant lots of flowers.....use the right tools.....take lots of pictures.....and come play with your great grandparents often....

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Monument Man

If you live long enough in a place that is small enough, you cannot help but lose: teachers retire, businesses fail, houses burn or blow away, schools close. The generations that have come before seem to be bigger than life, mighty men of valor and women of noble character. Compared to us present day Lilliputians, they were founders, pillars, stalwarts...people of uncommon energy...or imagination....or both. Fortunate is the community with pride enough to recognize its distinguished citizens with a memorial of appropriate substance and mettle: it is all well and good to borrow the visage or stature of a famous founder of note, but all the more personal to commemorate one of your own for passersby to Google unto the third and fourth generation. A street, a park, a school, a golf course or a baseball field....all these are fair game to rename as emblems of admiration and respect.

Sometimes the personalities and stories and memories are tied to vehicles....or habits....or hobbies...or other ephemera that gets scattered to the four corners until all trace of the person fades from disuse as the tellers of tall tales and their listeners become memories as well.

The Mather family and Hurst family have been shaping the hills into terraces and saving the soil of Atchison county for three generations now. It's the kind of partnership between long time family businesses that is a hallmark of small town life. Mather and Sons leveled the topography of our hilltop farmstead each time we decided to build a greenhouse. They dug out the dried up farm pond down the hill and piled up the trash trees below it in hopes of fulfilling our dreams of family fishing in the summer and skating in winter. They dug the hole for the 15,000 gallon reservoir that holds the lifeblood of our greenhouse business.

Maybe it was the novelty of farmers growing flowers, or maybe just the primal urge of spring fever, but we could expect Butch to visit the greenhouses months ahead of warm weather to check out the size of the tomato seedlings and anything blooming and pretty. He didn't need to be entertained; he was just getting refreshed. This fondness for growing things and greenhouses in general exhibited itself in gestures of neighborliness and generosity during some pretty tough times in our business.

But we don't need to rely on memories because Butch left us a lasting monument to his humor, whimsy and imagination. One year the county road crews opened up 150th street, the deeply cut dirt road west of our house and discovered that the irritating rock scraping the grader blade was actually a glacial erratic of simply stupendous proportions. Not only was there a pot hole of colossal size in the middle of our road, but also a pink quartzite speedbump five foot high, five foot wide and twelve feet long.

The road guys took the only sensible course; they pushed the thing downhill into a brushy corner of our field next to the creek. The Rock, as we called it, became the favorite destination for Lee and Ann, a hideout, a clubhouse, a place to play and pretend. It also became a recurring topic of conversation whenever Butch pulled up to visit the greenhouse. "You need that rock in your yard." he might say and I'd laugh. Or he'd say, "Just tell me where you want that rock in your yard..." And I'd smile. After all, the rock weighed 200 tons or so and was a half mile down the road, "down" being "downhill".

What is mere gravity against the force of a wild hair? One summery day, we were drawn up to the road by a tremendous groaning of machinery to find an amazing sight: the Mather and Sons bulldozer grinding its way up the hill PUSHING THE ROCK AHEAD OF IT....

We had ample time to marvel..an endeavor of that magnitude does not happen quickly. There was only one logical place for the rock to be planted...right in front of our north facing picture window. Terry Winstead, Butch's experienced operator, pivoted that rock in the middle of the road like it was a soda straw; his maneuvering was a thing of beauty.

Then....he pushed and THUMP! The earth shook and the rock rolled over into our yard threading the space between two ancient forsythia. THUMP! And the rock came to rest centered between the shrubs and the view from the house, as perfectly situated as if some garden designer had ordered his minions to move it 'just a skosh this way...there, THERE!'

It was a work of great good humor and a gift I never cease to appreciate. Our kids played and climbed and read on that rock. I built a garden around that rock. And our grandkids have danced and sung on its stage...used it as a fort....and jumped off it uncountable times shouting, 'Mom, look at this!'

Farmsteads change and homesteads come and go, but 200 ton hunks of quartzite last and last...and stay where they're put...unless a glacier comes along....

Or a man like Butch....

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About Grandpa

This day when I turned in off the gravel at the bin, I could see the combines and thanked my lucky stars that the neighbor's beans had already been harvested.  I've been down here before, but not often; this field is only 23 acres, easy to miss in the scheme of meal deliveries over the course of two plus months.  The terrain is a crazy quilt of river bottom fields and patches of oak timber, overlooked by steep uncultivated fields of brush and rocky glacial till....what passes for waste ground in this productive country.

When Blake's grandpa Charles T Hurst came south in the '30s, these bottoms were more water than soil, a riparian thicket of cottonwoods and old river beds, the higher ground planted to crops.  He helped clear some of those bottoms, felling the trees by hand one brutal winter.  It was part and parcel of the tales he told us all, making the object lesson easier to take with his humor.  Grandpa was born on the eve of Theodore Roosevelt's first term as President.  Like T.R., Grandpa was never afraid of hard work; he was a prime example of T.R.'s "strenuous life."

Grandpa had a heart attack the spring after Blake and I were married.  We were still in Columbia, planning to be back on the farm in May after graduation and coming back to Tarkio every weekend while we worked to make the little tenant house on the newly rented farm livable.  It was March and the cattle were out on the neighbor's bottoms when we got home; I helped Blake chase those critters through the muddy woods: a new wife in a strange new life, with no knowledge of the lay of the land, and part of a family in shock and worry.  These many years later, I recall the abject helplessness I felt, channelling tears and frustration into Lord only knows what maledictions on Hurst cattle.

Grandpa recovered completely from that scare in his 78th year. He continued to go to auctions accompanied by a grandson, run a disk, and drive the combine every day of harvest until he could no longer get up and down the ladder.  Everyone learned to give his combine a wide berth in the front and stay out of his ever increasing blind spots.

 He and Grandma welcomed their first great grandchild in 1979 when Lee was born.
I don't know what he's telling little Lee in this picture but I can tell you how he spoiled his great grand children in ways he probably never spoiled his grandsons.  Blake learned many of his life lessons by working side by side with Grandpa, long before I was around.  I saw a man who delighted little babies by playing bumblebee, bumblebee with them (bzzz,bzzz,bzzz) in a most undignified way; who always had a HoHo in the freezer to share and whose face would never fail to light up when a toddler was around.

Grandpa did his bookkeeping on an adding machine and kept his photos and files downstairs in a freezer so they were safe from water and mice. He seldom threw anything away, on the assumption one might still get some use from it.  One of Blake's favorite tales has to do with fixing fence with Grandpa.  The wire was rusted and brittle and Blake asked Grandpa how old it was. "I don't know, "said Grandpa, "It was used when I put it up in the '30s...." One year Blake ordered him a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, but came to regret the gift when Grandpa used the news to tell him...often... about the impending doom of the next Depression.  Once burned, twice shy.  Grandpa didn't live in the past, but he never forgot it...

When Annie was born, we moved out of the tenant house into a house in town with enough bedrooms and heat.  Grandpa never said anything to me, but he wouldn't darken the door of the house either except to meet his second granddaughter.  Three years later, we moved out of town when we purchased a farm with a house on it....and back into Grandpa's good graces.  That spring he showed up at our door and put up my mailbox...a tacet benediction for the returning prodigals.

I am always surprised by Grandpa's thatch of black hair when I see pictures of him as a young man; I only met him when he was well into his 70s and white headed.  He always wore long sleeves and overalls.  Often the overalls were so worn they'd lost their pattern.  He turned his left foot over and wore his boots out on the inside....a trait I see every day because it has passed down to his eldest grandson.

Grandpa loved to take us all out to eat.  Sometimes that meant Betty's Hilltop or the Rulo River Club where we'd all eat fried fish.  A special occasion might mean a trip to Wheeler's in Auburn where they'd set up the back room with a long table to accomodate the nine adults and four wild youngsters that comprised the family in those days. Our little family didn't eat out much back then, but the chance to go to Wheeler's was still a mixed blessing; would we get to enjoy the good food or would one of the kids make Grandma Hurst nervous by throwing a fit, spilling their water, or just not sitting at all. As we loaded up, leaving the wreckage behind us, someone would put some more money on the table for a tip; Grandpa was always generous to his family, but not much of a tipper....

It was a November evening in 1998 that we got the call from Blake's folks to come to the hospital.  Blake and I were driving back to town from where he'd been running anhydrous on a farm north of Tarkio.  Grandpa left us a month shy of his 98th birthday with family surrounding him, with the harvest all in and a goodly portion of the fall work accomplished.  We still tell Grandpa's stories to his great grand kids, who remember him, and now to his great great grandchildren.  He was our generation's tie to farming as it was before self propelled machinery, before commercial fertilizers and seed, before flood control and terraces, before paved roads and electricity. He was our everyday example of how self discipline, frugality, and industry can overcome hard times. He and Grandma made 60 plus years of marriage; just more evidence of the virtue of stick-to-it-tiveness.He was good to his family, and had a dignity he had earned . Grandpa could be stubborn and set in his ways, but he covered it all with a smile.

My Mother's Garden

I have a wonderful mechanical planter in the greenhouse. Sixteen little needles vacuum up the bouncing seeds in the vibrating tray. A switch trips the vacuum on each row as the needles rotate up and down and the little seeds drop through the metal tube and plop into their nest of peat moss and perlite. A swift trip through the little dirt machine gives them the equivalent of a cotton thermal blanket to keep them moist and toasty til the various physiological processes awake the sleeping root.

But when I was growing up, my mom did things the old fashioned way. Dixie cups of soil allowed us to start a few favored flowers indoors early, but for the most part, her flower garden came up in rows carefully sowed or sprinkled after the natural frost free date in our northern Illinois garden. Gardening on Highland Ave. involved a trip to the local nursery; I can't remember exactly what route we took, but I do recall the nursery yard of trees, the scents of chemical and peat, moisture and mulch. The garden center was a low informal shed but the seed packets were arranged symmetrically in bright array against a wall. Bins held bulbs, sets, assorted roots and who knows what else. I wasn't a gardener from birth and I certainly never helped pick out flowers or trees or shrubs at that age as I later scoured antique stores for enticing pieces of Victorian furniture. But the garden center was a wonderful place to be, full of crannies; a maze of aisles, packed dirt paths and piles of stone.

Our yard was just prettier than most of our neighbors. My mom had a long front flower bed in front of the house; my dad had built a low white fence to support the taller annuals. One of my dad's rules was to keep shrubbery away from the house proper, so instead of the traditional foundation planting of pfitzers or spirea, our house had a flagstone path with stonecrop sedum between the stones. This was never totally successful but the battle against little creepy crawly weeds was joined annually. The north side of the house was my mother's rock garden. It was a cool damp planting full of stones collected various places and planted with assorted sedums and yarrows and hostas. Following the path led to a compost pile surrounded by hedge; the back yard was contained by the same hedge. When we were little, we had a swing set in the back yard. There was also a small vegetable garden that later became a rose garden...or was it the other way around? At any rate, raising roses in that climate was a sketchy proposition and led to regular replacements of some dearly departed beauty. Perhaps seed packets didn't trip my trigger but strolling through the rows of roses, smelling the blooms, reading the names, certainly did. The Morton Arboretum had a gorgeous and extensive rose garden, the only part of a childhood visit there that I remember. 'Mr.Lincoln', red, 'Charlotte Armstrong', pink and the queen of the garden, 'Peace' were the roses that graced the kitchen.

The south side of the house faced the blistering sun and even though my folks planted a silver maple for some speedy shade, the snapdragons my mother planted for several years didn't thrive. Two other short timers were the mountain ashes with their lovely clusters of berries and finely divided foliage. Alas, year by year another branch would die off until they too were discarded. The backyard was tiny on our corner lot, but just outside the privet hedge was a tamarisk. I know now that these small trees can be terribly invasive and pesky, but in our yard, the tamarisk was an exotic with its blue green haze of foliage topped in summertime with lavender plumes. Even the name evoked far away climes.
My favorite tree of the lot was the half wild crab in the front yard bordering the fence and flower bed. It was more a shrub than a tree, low and spreading, with profuse pale pink blooms followed by large crabapples smaller than Mac apples but much the same shape. They were large enough to be picked by the bushel and I don't remember a flaw to them. Perhaps they were tough skinned; more likely my folks sprayed for pests like they did the apples. Unlike the Yellow and Red Delicious "dwarfs" in the north yard, this tree always had a crop. With experimentation, my mom developed the knack for cooking the crabapples down into a rich red tart jelly of immensely concentrated flavor. With such a quantity of apples annually, we enjoyed crabapple jam nearly year round. Occasionally, the batch would set up so quickly, we wound up with crabapple taffy. Sometimes it wouldn't set at all and we poured crabapple syrup onto our toast. One year I made some apricot jam that I considered near to the nectar of the gods, but only that one time did my jam surpass the jam of that unknown crabapple tree.

The bright and cheery annuals were simple staples of seed grown posies. Blue morning glories covered the white fence. Cosmos nodded in the summer heat. Four o' clocks grew bigger and bigger as the summer afternoons lingered on. My favorites back then were the little moss roses that fronted the border. Late in the summer we would chalk the sidewalks and driveway, or play hopscotch, or roller skate, then rest up and pick the little caps off the seed pods and sprinkle the little black spheres across the garden.

My mother stayed at home with my sister and me. She cooked every meal, cleaned, gardened, sewed, shopped. She was room mother innumerable times; I was always proud to have my vivacious and lovely mom along on field trips, or at Girl Scouts, or helping with Vacation Bible school. We traveled with my father and enjoyed relaxed summer days walking the small towns of the West, swimming in the motel pools, and reading lots and lots of books.
We were the beneficiaries of an eclectic upbringing, full of imagination, culture, hand labor, and togetherness. I had the wonderful example of a loving partnership of a marriage as my father helped with household chores and my mother joined him in his myriad interests.

Did the garden gene come from one side of my heritage...or the other? That's hard to tell, but I know that growing up with the house plants crowding the picture window, the decades old Christmas cactus strategically placed for cool winter sunshine, the weekend trips to the Forest Preserve to learn the names of the local flora, all made it just that much more likely that I would love the out of doors, the marvelous plant kingdom God has provided for our health and happiness. And so, on this Mother's Day, I want to give credit where credit is due: to memories of my mother's lovely flower garden and my lovely mother as well.

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